By TOM KUNTZ

Published: March 28, 1999

YOU know about the Tower of Babel, the ambitious architectural project that the Lord foiled in Genesis by rendering its overreaching builders unable to communicate with one another. Now consider its modern heir: the babble about towers spouted by architects.

Stephen A. Kliment, former editor of Architectural Record, says a lot of the time even he can't figure out what the heck today's architects and other high-concept designers are talking about. In his book ''Writing for Design Professionals'' (W. W. Norton, 1998), he pleads for clarity in proposals, letters, brochures and professional articles.

Sure, every profession has its useful private shorthand, he says, and architecture is no exception. But when you start talking about decontextualizing your intrinsic modularity -- designer-babble terms that Mr. Kliment says he has encountered -- you know your profession's in trouble linguistically.

Below are some longer passages collected by Mr. Kliment for this article. TOM KUNTZ

From ''Culture, Merchandise, or Just Light Entertainment? New Architecture at the Millennium'' by Bruce Thomas of Lehigh University, in the May 1997 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education:

Now, as the ''simulacrum'' continues to gain currency in architectural theory and as the map of culture is being recharted into cyberspace, tinkering with the architectural design process is more than merely a matter of exchanging juxtaposition for synthesis. Humanism may, as Eisenman and others so glibly contend, already be gone, but its replacement is at best a highly speculative alternative. As the raw power of media plays an ever larger role in shaping the intellectual basis for much of the emerging millennium's culture, we run the risk of building a new architecture not on substantial foundations, but according to a debasement of humanist ideals, what might be described as ''tabloid humanism.''

Crystal clear enough for you? Then try ''Beyond the Valley of Silicon Architecture'' in the current Harvard Design Magazine, by Mitchell Schwarzer, professor of architectural history at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco:

My aim here is to inquire into architecture's participation in the construction of the information age in Silicon Valley. I intend to situate the architecture of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties within a theory of capitalist realism and analyses of the pragmatic economics propelling development of the high technology office campus. How does architecture operate free from history's burdens and ideology's veils, yet beholden to utilitarian programs and outrageous profit margins? What role does architecture have within an information revolution where the notion of representation is being radically redefined and dematerialized?

The author's just warming up, continuing a few paragraphs later:

In other words, if experimental architecture is not possible on high technology campuses for all the reasons discussed above, couldn't architecture be split between calculated program and incidental program, between functional, profitable office zones and other enclosures, extensions, excavations, and escarpments that respond to the landscape? Instead of architecture representing the information age, or popular culture as Venturi would have it, couldn't architecture be more of a flickering between utilitarian practices and ludic transgression? This second architecture, directed toward the resonances of landscape and not the symbolism of a particular company, would appeal to most firms needing space in the Valley, and might go a long way toward overcoming the real-estate conundrum of exit strategies.

Asia too has its conundrums, real estate and otherwise. And architecturally it's not having much fun either, as Cherie Wendelken suggested last year in Thresholds 17, a journal published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture:

In recent years a new identity has emerged for Asia in contemporary architectural discourse. In the writing of Rem Koolhaas and others, Asia as an idea has become ephemerality, megaform, placelessness, globalization. These notions displace -- even invert -- earlier European and American constructs of Asia as a timeless or ancient non-modern realm against which to measure the modern. Yet strangely, the new idea of Asia constructs an embodiment of the postmodern -- a place of another extreme where history is willfully abandoned, visual meaning is casually discursive, and all built form is tentative. The city of Tokyo becomes a discourse about ephemerality. The rebuilding of Singapore becomes an emblem of cultural tabula rasa and bigness.

It's enough to make you fear for the future of the profession. And maybe you should. In the November 1997 Journal of Architectural Education, Kelly Carlson-Redding of the University of North Carolina employs the architect lingo of today to write of the challenges facing the architects of tomorrow:

Architecture students today face a variety of complex and often contradictory models of materiality in architecture. Ideas about ''honest'' materials and rational tectonics are still touted by modernist and neo-modernist educators and practitioners, while many urban and suburban environments are inundated with both well-constructed and shamefully constructed postmodern buildings -- thin-skinned compositions in which pattern making overrides materiality and extravagance is often substituted for interest. . . . Resurgent interests in expressive tectonics have led to fetishistic fixations on exaggerated elements of structure, construction and building systems. . . .

As educators we are fortunate to work with architecture students in a time so rich in variety and possibility, but amid this wealth of divergent propositions it is imperative that we help students order their own theoretical and instrumental position with regard to questions of materiality.

But perhaps the most telling observation about architect blather is the one made by a juror recently at a design competition:

Thick reports are required to justify fee!

Photo: What we have here is a failure to communicate: Breugel the Elder's ''Tower of Babel.'' (KHM)